Worrying Style Trends: The Christmas Jumper

For some time now I’ve harboured a fantasy of somehow hijacking a major magazine and starting a campaign of stylistic terrorism that involves coming up with the most ridiculous fashion ideas I can possibly think of and then using my position within the magazine to convince its readers that whatever I’ve come up with, no matter how ridiculous it may be, is a genuine up-and-coming trend. One month I could tell them that the clown look is in and they should stock up on curly wigs and oversized shoes, and another I could convince them that all the celebs in LA are going crazy for luminous codpieces and that they should get one before they sell out.

I think it would be pretty easy; once in power I’d simply set up a fashion shoot with a suitably empty headed celebrity, pretend to be a leading stylist, dress the celebrity up in the ridiculous garb then run it on the fashion pages under a suitable headline like ‘OMG!!!! Pixie Lott dazzles in her luminous codpiece!!! She’s like, really cool?!!! OMG!!!!’ (I assume that anyone who works on a magazine like Cosmopolitan speaks and thinks exclusive in textspeak, with their every utterance peppered with OMG!!!s and LOL!!!s, though I confess I don’t have any concrete evidence to support this suspicion).

However, in recent months I’ve come to suspect that somebody has beaten me to this, and that cultural hackers are already working in deep cover at most, if not all, of the style magazines and fashion houses. My suspicions were initially aroused by an issue of Esquire a few months back that ran a piece that featured chav-rapper Professor Green modelling chunky knitwear, which, as far as I could tell, was meant to be taken seriously. But that was only the beginning.

For many years now there has been a yuletide tradition of hideous sweaters being given as presents by elderly and confused relatives and the unfortunate recipients then being required to wear them for the rest of Christmas until the elderly relative has gone home and the monstrous garment can be given to a charity shop or destroyed. Now, however, it would seem that a number of shops and magazines have decided that those very jumpers are in fact now the very height of fashion and should be worn through choice rather than under extreme duress.

Whilst I would love to believe that this startling trend really is the result of the aforementioned style anarchists setting out to subvert the whole fashion industry, I have an uneasy feeling that it is not. I suspect that many people in powerful and influential positions within the fashion industry, bizarrely, believe that there is a place for such garments in civilised society.

But if you have any doubts as to whether I am right here, I have a challenge for you. This posting is decorated by various pictures of sweaters. Some of them are garments currently available from well-known high street retailers; others are ones I found photos of by Googling ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’. I have removed them from their context. Now, can you honestly say that (a) you can identify which ones are high street brands and which are sweaters your gran would buy and (b) you would actually wear any of them?

I do not believe you can. So if you open your presents on Christmas morning and are unfortunate to receive one of these, say you like it, wear it for the rest of the day but, by God, make sure it’s thrown on the fire first thing on Boxing Day.

Icons of the Style Vortex: Carlos D (and the Sad Decline of Interpol)

Watching this year’s Reading Festival I couldn’t help but be reminded of that quote along the lines of, ‘you either die a hero or stay around long enough to become a villain’. I think it was from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietszche. Or it might have been from one of the Spiderman films. But regardless of its true source, I never felt it to be more true than when I watched Interpol’s performance on the Sunday afternoon. The musicianship wasn’t that bad, even if it seemed that they were at times running through the motions, and seemed to largely base their setlist on their second album, Antics, (aka The Interpol Album That Everyone Has), but what was more worrying, nay, disturbing, was the decline in their sense of style.

When they burst onto the scene in the middle of the last decade they were the last word in New York cool; whilst the predictable indie kids dutifully did what the NME told them and worshipped the Strokes we must never as a society forget that not only did that band peddle nothing but skinny-trousered, tousle-haired, trust-funded clichés (of both the musical and sartorial varieties) but that they would give rise to the reprehensible Razorlight and, even worse, the Kooks, a band whose existence surely ranks amongst the Western world’s greatest shames. (Indeed, I can only hope that the painfully skinny jeans that Razorlight and the Kooks were poured into were part of a secretive conspiracy to cut off the blood flow to their nether regions and ensure they were unable to procreate; after all, who wants to live in a world where the likes of Johnny Borrell and Luke Pritchard are allowed to propagate their genes?)

Interpol, however, were different; gaining extra kudos for being a New York band whose singer was born in Clacton-On-Sea (which is far cooler than being born in, say, LA) they also had a unique stylistic trump card in their hand in the form of bassist Carlos Dengler, aka Carlos D. He was far too cool to lower himself to wearing skinny jeans or the sort of t-shirts that are meant to look second hand but are invariably from pretentious Lower East Side boutiques that only trustafarians can afford to shop in, and instead forged ahead with his own unique style that took the form of a quasi-fascist look involving ties and waistcoats, a striking combination of blacks and reds, gun holsters, armbands and vaguely Hitlerish hair. A kind of Nazi Rock Dandy, if you will. His idiosyncratic flair, along with his aloof stage persona and low slung bass guitar led him to become the most famous member of the band, despite not being the singer.

But at Reading, everything had changed. With Carlos D having left the band the year before they seemed to have lost their way not only musically but stylistically. The new bassist looked confused in his charity shop suit and whilst Sam Fogarino and Daniel Kessler were trying their best to keep the look going, singer Paul Banks had bizarrely opted to wear a tracksuit. What happened? Did he leave his suit at the dry cleaners? Did he not want to risk getting it dirty in a festival? Or did he just become enamoured of Oasis and decide that adopting their look was the way forward?

Well, whatever the reason, it could now be an uphill struggle for the band. As for Carlos, he has now retired much of his extravagant look, claiming it was best suited to a rock star and he now prefers the anonymity of not dressing quite so flamboyantly. But perhaps a future as the alt-rock Gok Wan beckons, teaching confused rockers to develop a new sense of style? And, let’s face it, there are plenty of people who could do with his help. He could start with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; how can you not like anyone who has, in the press, advised that overblown, overage and overweight pitiful excuse for a rock star to ‘stop looking like a homophobic, misogynistic date-rapist jock from Michigan’?

Amen, brothers.